Employers can offer various types of salary or pay plans for their employees. Some employees can work within a structure that pays a set salary. In other situations, some employees can work under a hourly basis. Within these various wage structures, some additional rules may be in effect. For example, some employers offer paid overtime when an employee works more than a certain number of hours per day or a certain number of hours per week. Another rule that may apply is allowing a grace period with respect to a set starting time or ending time as well as establishing or adjusting the length of the grace period. In this case, if an employee arrives within a certain number of minutes before or after a set starting time, then that employee is considered to have started at the starting time, which can simplify the calculation of hours worked. Another rule that may apply is the use of rounding time to the nearest 15 minute increment or other increment.
In many work situations, employees are required to “clock in” at the start of a work shift and “clock out” at the end of the shift. In some situations, a mechanical stamping machine can be used to mark the respective times on a time card. And in other cases, the times can be written or typed on a time card. A company's time and labor administrators typically use these time cards to enter time data into a system to record the number of hours worked by the employees. When entering time, they can also apply any applicable rules to the time entries on the time cards to separate regular time from overtime, to apply grace period rules, to round off time to the nearest increment, and/or other rules. In this type of system, both the raw time entered on the time card and the time calculated as a result of the company's applicable rules can be stored electronically or in a paper filing system.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a conventional time data repository 10 for storing labor time information. Time data repository 10 may include any suitable mechanical and/or electrical storage system. In FIG. 1, time data repository 10 includes a raw time module 12 for storing raw time and a calculated time module 14 for storing time that is calculated as a result of the company's applicable labor time rules. The information in raw time module 12 and calculated time module 14 can be compared if necessary to resolve any inconsistencies. Normally, raw time information represents starting times of each employee for each day and the ending times for the respective employee. The raw time information can also represent the number of hours that each employee works for each day. This raw time information is entered and stored in raw time module 12. Depending on the company's applicable rules, an administrator can use the raw time information to determine calculated time, which is entered and stored in calculated time module 14.